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Comment by traviswingo | Hacker News Reader

I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.

And it’s not even relevant to what’s actually on the site linked.

Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Did you care before when you saw the same Wordpress theme repeatedly, or Bootstrap layouts?

The content is what’s interesting, and it is.

Edit to clarify: I read the comment as the issue being the look and feel of the site being AI generated - as in, “this website looks AI generated. It sucks.” NOT the content itself being AI generated.

Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.

My stance: An AI generated website with the authors original thoughts is fine to me. I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it serves its purpose.

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> Who cares if the site is LLM generated?

Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.

That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.

> The content is what’s interesting

If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.

Where do you consider the line here to be? What if the design and the core code is mine but I use AI to apply it to additional elements, pages, etc (something I do a fair amount)? What if I designed, or had a very good human designer design, an entire well-crafted design system and design language in Figma but feed it to AI to help turn it into static assets?

What if all I used AI for was to more quickly drive tedious work, like mass-change colors, preview variants, or export assets?

Is it the replacement of the creative aspects of a craft with AI when I lose your interest, or is it the moment I utilize it at all?

> Who cares if the site is LLM generated?

Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.

I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/23/disney-plus-price-incre...

A human doing the research would likely have picked up on that. An LLM that just reads everything literally does not.

Compared to BL (Before LLMs) when all human-authored pages were completely reliable?

In either case it's important to verify information, and LLMs are increasingly more capable of fact-checking.

It's not like the before times were a paradise but putting together anything like this took time. If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research. In LLM land you can just tell Claude to fart out an investigation in a few minutes and never invest time in it.

"before times" a subtle nod to "Silo"? I hope so...

"Before times" is a fairly common phrase in post-apocalyptic media. Silo just coopted it as an easy shortcut for the audience.

>If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research

There are and were entire sites and networks dedicated to conspiracy and disinformation. Hell, people have been payed to spread disinformation. People have done it deliberately for the lolz.

It has alway been possibly to get your nonsense enrgaved upon the web in an afternoon. That it now takes less time is irrelevant. You should have been checking your sources then, and you should be checking your sources now.

Authors of the past would often not provide sources, so if you were interested you'd have to track them down. This is also true today.

That an LLM is in the loop is no different, in kind, from the old copy-pasta and network driven spread of misinformation. The problem was never the tools (ah, damn, now anyone who knows [html] can just lie on the internet)(ah, damn now anyone who knows [prompting] can just lie on the internet).

The problem isn't the tools, it's the users unwillingness and or reluctance to develop critical reading and thinking skills. If you're using "Not an LLM" as a proxy for "gains reliability in my mind" then you're being lazy. It is just as easy to lie without an LLM.

You don’t get it do you? The content is wrong and this aesthetic means: you cannot trust this. As someone who makes a living making website I wouldn’t have expected the tide to turn so fast. Clients now hire me to absolutely NOT have this aesthetic

If I can generate the site myself with an LLM, it's a lot less compelling. Maybe just share the prompt in that case.

> Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.

This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.

> I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.

I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.

> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.

Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.

And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.

>Can you trust human content at face value? No you can't.

As long as these comments come up, people haven't given up against this flood. It's a good sign. Also consider cause and effect. These comments only exist because of AI content.

Another issue is that "This site was made with AI" just doesn't really add much to the conversation. There will very likely come a time soon when 95-99% of the sites that make the HN front page will be AI-assisted or AI-generated. What are these people going to do? Comment "This site was made with AI" on every single article? Why not just add a disclaimer to the top of HN that says "Most of these articles are made with AI" so the commenters don't have to log in just to tell us each and every time?

I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.

"This is AI" similarly adds nothing.

we're looking for author voices, not claude proxies.

> LLM generated

This is a proxy for "the author didn't give a shit"..Not always, but often.

> Who cares if the site is LLM generated?

Good people do.

I wish we could get past this debate.

Different people have different feelings. Bucketing into binary "good" and "not good" based on whether they have the exact same framing as you do is dehumanizing. Stop it. Respect other people.

There is space for nuance:

If you're spitting out raw LLM output and not looking at or reading it and requiring other people to use it as-is, while representing it as your own original work, you are treating your own time and attention as more valuable than that of others. You can expect a reaction based on this.

If you're blanket-dismissing someone else's work because they used one or more specific tools, regardless of how much of their own time and attention they put into it before sharing it in a place where you were able to see it -- or perhaps you're doing that dismissal without even seeing it -- you are treating their time and attention as superficial and a rounding error compared with their choice of tools. You can expect a reaction based on this.

In between, there is a _whole_ lot of room for different take and opinions, and we're collectively figuring out what's acceptable and what isn't. We'll never fully get there and that is Okay. But we can at least try to calibrate on "are we treating other people respectfully" instead of a shitty proxy for it.

Do not respect Evil.

There is no room for nuance. AI is capitals access to our labour. It's evil. The end.

> Different people have different feelings.

Different people have different feelings about what we know call "the Holocaust". They're not equally worthy.

One of these things was wholesale systemized actual state-run murder. The other is a range that encompasses big companies run by awful people and also a binary blob I can run on a GPU in my basement.

Don’t weaken how awful the Holocaust was.

Evil has many forms.

our current society has such an anemic perception of morality

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